


The Gemini Project

by sakurazawa



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-17
Updated: 2014-09-04
Packaged: 2018-01-01 19:26:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 16,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1047688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sakurazawa/pseuds/sakurazawa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After recovering Simmons from a two-month abduction by a clandestine organization called The Gemini Project, the team tries to figure out exactly what was done to her, what Gemini is after, and what—if anything—the answers to those questions mean for the future of S.H.I.E.L.D.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Recovery

**Author's Note:**

> This is an un-betad fic, so please feel free to send me any corrections you have, especially where I've got the science wrong. Work originally posted on Tumblr, under the screenname homemadepestoaioli.

“I’ve got her.”

Simmons didn’t wake when May’s palm covered her forehead, nor when her thumb gently pressed back an eyelid. May shone her utility light into first one eyelid, then the other.

“She’s not conscious, but it doesn’t look like there’s any significant physical trauma. Fitz, how do I unhook her from this thing?” May passed her hand over the wires and metal bands binding Simmons to the medical chair like a fly in a mechanical spiderweb.

“ _I’m coming down there,_ ” buzzed a voice in her ear.

“No, Fitz. Stay in position. Just tell me where to start.”

“ _I don’t know what any of those chemicals are—I can’t tell you without looking at it myself._ ”

“Stay. In. Position.”

“ _Okay. Okay. Em…look closer at the sort of yellow-tinged one. Bloody hell. All right, and the red. And the orange. Okay, pull them all out._ ”

May clamped the tube and pulled the tape off the first I.V. needle. “What have they got her on?” she asked, pulling out the first needle.

“ _No clue. I’m an engineer, not a bio-chemist. Just get her out of there; we’ll sort it out later!_ ”

The report of machine gun fire echoed from down the hallway.

“ _Two minutes, May!_ ” Ward’s voice grunted, followed by a shout and more gunfire.

“Copy.” May ripped off the tape of the second needle. She managed, with Fitz’s assistance, to disable the electrical field that threatened to activate when Simmons’s weight left the chair.

“ _Bring the I.V. bags,_ ” Fitz said. “ _We need to know what they’ve got her on._ ”

May slung Simmons over her shoulder with a grunt, but just as she freed an arm and reached for the first bag, the door buckled. She heaved Simmons back into the chair and whirled just as the first foot-guard kicked in the mangled door.

May grabbed the I.V. stand and swung it, knocking the pistol from the guard’s hand. The reaction was instinctive, but her next move was more calculated, fueled by a finely-honed rage for the gray ghost of a girl she had meant to protect. The guard gave a shout of surprise as she leap toward him, planting a boot in his chest and kicking him backwards into his two fellows. She arced her back, planted the foot of the stand, and carried herself through the summersault. The men recovered just as she found her feet and swept the stand up like a bowstaff.

“Come and get her, boys.”

It was a matter of seconds before all three men lay sprawled at her feet.

“No time for the I.V. bags,” she said, ehaving Simmons’s limp form back over her shoulders. “Ward, I need cover.”

***

The withdrawal was the hardest bit, aside from the mental gymnastics it took for Jemma to wrap her brain around the notion that she had been gone for eight and a half weeks. Eight and a half weeks, since that night outside the research station in Anchorage, when she’d gone out to check if the sensor had frozen over. She’d found it in pieces and, seconds later, found herself laying supine on the permafrost, the Aurora Borealis sending undulating curtains of green across and impossibly clear and starry sky.

She’d woken up in a lab. Not her lab. The rest was not something she liked to think about.

Still, the nausea, the high pressure headaches, and the dizziness that had pitched her into walls, lab tables, or members of the team were no picnic and, practically speaking, made doing her job far more difficult than the memories of surgical masks and injections. All of it would have been easier to put behind her if she could just figure out what they’d done to her. But, since her moment of vertigo—which had resulted in a gash on her left hand and given Fitz such a shock that he’d dropped his propane torch—she’d been banned from the lab until Sci-Ops returned an analysis of her physical.

“Yup, the whole electric dog-fence thing kind of sucks,” said Skye, not looking up from her laptop screen as they sat opposite each other in the Bus’s window booth.

“It’s not that I don’t understand the reasoning,” Jemma said. “It’s just that..oh, I want to say this in a way that doesn’t sound disrespectful to my Sci-Ops colleages, but…”

“You’d kinda like to be the one who figures out about yourself?” Skye offered, tapping her fingers on her keyboard. The sound of laser fire punctuated her statement. “Know the feeling.”

Jemma sighed and laced her fingers on the table in front of her. “I just want to make sure they’ve considered all the variables. What if the Gemini Project was attemting to isolate the antibodies from that alien virus because they intend to use it as a threat, or release it and be the sole provider of vaccines and anti-serums? Now, they could use my DNA to do it.” She twisted her fingers together. “Or, it could have been a random abduction of the first S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent they could get their hands on to test—oh, I don’t know—a new super-serum.”

Skye looked up with a sudden grin. “What, like Captain America?”

Jemma flushed. “Not to say it’s been at all successful if that was the intent. If anything, I feel more like something that’s got on the wrong side of Dr. Banner’s transformation.”

But Skye was still grinning. “Don’t tell Coulson—he’ll want the Captain Chemistry trading cards.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

“Or you could be the Biology Babe, or the Periodic…Princess…”

“I think I’d like to avoid a superhero name with ‘Periodic’ in it, thanks.”

“Yeah, I thought about that pretty much right when I said it.”

The hiss of a door sliding open preceded a shadow, cast three ways by the overhead light. Skye, still grinning, lifted two fingers at the figure walking up from behind Jemma.

“Hey,” she said. Jemma’s throat constricted slightly, and she knew a brief moment of anxiety before she looked up.

Fitz smiled at Skye and dropped into the seat beside Jemma.

“Oh, hello, Fitz!” she said in what she hoped was a decent approximation of her usual tone.

“Hey,” he said, glancing at her. The instant their eyes met, she was sorry she’d looked at him. It was that look again—not the one Ward or May or Coulson gave her, as if they were waiting for her to have a nervous break down or burst into flames—but the look that told her exactly what eight-and-a-half weeks not knowing had done to him. The look like he couldn’t quite believe his eyes when he saw her, like she might evaporate under his fingers if he touched her.

He made it harder not to think of it, because every time he looked at her, she knew he was remembering the sight of her unconscious, bruised, full of unidentified chemicals and unknown trauma.

Fitz settled in his seat, legs shifting so his thigh pressed against hers, his arm draped along the back of her chair without touching her. Jemma didn’t move her hands from the table, but nudged his knee. He nudged her back.

Now it was Skye giving her a look, but the hint of mischief in the other girl’s dark eyes sent a different sort of anxiety through her stomach.

No, she thought as her jaw began to ache and heat pushed into her throat. That wasn’t dread. That was vomit.

“Fitz, move.” She shoved his shoulder and after the past week, he knew well enough not to question her. She made it to the loo just in time, heaving her lunch into it. She crossed her arms over the toilet and rested her head on her forearms, waiting for the inevitable second round. Someone stepped over her feet and crouched beside her, and the fingers that scooped back her hair were thin. She smelled perfume.

“Jesus,” Skye said. “You’d think a week and a half would be enough recovery from whatever crap they’ve got you on. What’d they give you—alien heroin?”

Jemma coughed out a humorless laugh. “I don’t want to think what might be in an alien form of diacetylmorphine, thanks. I have enough problems with the actual opiates.

“They gave you morphine?”

“Yes, presumably to dull the sensations of whatever they were-” a second stream of vomit cut her off mid-sentence. Skye rubbed her back.

“We gotta figure out what they did to you. You’re not getting better and Sci-Ops isn’t working fast enough.”

Jemma pushed herself away from the toilet and wiped her mouth with the wad of toilet paper Skye handed her. She pulled the flusher with trembling hands and climbed to her feet. Skye met her eyes. Her smile had disappeared. She reached out to tuck a strand of hair behind Jemma’s ear, reminding her very much of her older sister.

“You wanna go lie down?”

Jemma nodded, wondering with a flash of hurt where Fitz had gone. The smell had probably got to him. Her legs were beginning to feel like rubber, disconnected and without sensation. She was almost amazed to see them continuing to climb the little staircase up to the bunk area.

Skye got her halfway up the stairs before the hiss of the lab doors sounded again behind them.

“Hang on, let me help.” It was Fitz’s voice. He blundered out of the lab a moment later and took the stairs two at a time, taking both Jemma’s elbows from behind and propelling her up the stairs. “Put the kettle on,” he explained. “Earl Grey this time, or Ceylon?”

The tightness returned to her throat, but she smiled anyway. “Ceylon.”

“Milk, no sugar.”

“Yes, perfect.”

As Skye relinquished her arm to key open her bunk, Jemma leaned a little more on Fitz. She felt him shift to counter her weight against his arm, a response that was more instinctive than intellectual, whatever he would have claimed. She wanted to prove she was recovering, that she could do things for herself, but he needed to recover with her. Besides, he touched her so rarely, she was prone to throwing pride and thought-process to the wind when he did.

Her room, though not as neat as usual, was still rather better put-together than she was at the moment. Bed made, pictures neat, and only her pajamas and dressing gown crumpled next to the bookshelves, which were in need of dusting. As Fitz left to get the tea and Skye helped her into pajamas again, another rush of dizziness forced her to sit on the end of her bed.

“I can override your access to the lab,” Skye said. “Get you in there tonight. You can do a few tests, run some analysis or whatever it is you do, and be out of there in two hours. I bet you’ll find at least a few answers.

Jemma pushed her hot face off her knees and wiped a hand across her neck. It was a risk, but there was something agitating the depths of her memory, a strange sensation like a fingernail down the back of her neck.

“All right, only…could I ask you not to tell Fitz?”

“Not to tell Fitz what?” Fitz said, elbowing the door open. he carried tea and a plate of biscuits on an instrument tray. “You ladies talking about me?”

“Of course we are.”

He smiled in mock satisfaction. “Of course you are.”

Skye stood up and brushed her hands down her coat. “Well, I’m gonna go…do that thing…that we talked about. Want me to…you know…um, get you later?”

“Ah…yes, thank you,” Jemma said. Fitz’s expression transformed from confused to suspicious, then to resigned, and he shook his head.

“I don’t want to know.” He snatched at her neatly-made covers and pulled them back. “Why aren’t you in bed?”

Jemma jumped. “Sorry,” she said, scooting from the end of the bed and sliding her legs under the covers. She leaned back against the head-board, and as she arranged her pillows behind her, Fitz fussed with the blanket, tucking it over her legs.

“And there’s your tea,” he said, handing her the mug. Their fingers brushed, and she pulled away slower than she might normally have done. The ceramic was warm against her palms, and the heat of the tea soothed the pock-marked feeling the gastric secretions had left in her throat.

Fitz settled on the bed next to her knees and nabbed a biscuit from the plate. He ate it without looking at her. She sipped her tea in silence, glad for his company despite the awkwardness. Her tea slowly disappeared, Fitz demolished the plate of biscuits, and by the time he reached for the mug in her slackening fingers, she was happy to slide under the covers and fall into the arms of sleep.

On his way out, Fitz tapped the control panel to draw the sun-shade over Jemma’s window, darkening the room.

He watched her a moment, marking the steady swell and shrink of her body under the covers. He wanted to go back, crouch by her bed, and make sure she was really there, breathing, heart beating. He wanted to put his hand on her face and feel her skin warm, like it had that first day she’d opened her eyes at his touch and he’d kissed her sweaty forehead and told her it was about damn time she’d woken up.

Her hand wasn’t fully under the covers, curled there limp and pale and cold-looking. He made an aborted attempt to go back and tuck it under, unsure what exactly was stopping him.

His throat flexed and he turned back to the door in silence.


	2. Research

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Skye helps Jemma bypass her restriction to the lab so she can get some answers about what's been done to her.

Skye almost didn’t go through with it. Not because she thought Simmons ought to follow the stupid order not to run her own tests, but because of the gray cast to her skin and the shadows hanging on her thin face, even in sleep. Then again, if anyone could figure out what was wrong with Simmons and find a way to cure her, it was Simmons. She’d already proven that.

Skye edged into the scarily neat room and let the door slide shut behind her. The digital clock panel next to Jemma’s bunk read 3:31 a.m. in glowing amber letters, giving Skye just enough light to make it the two steps to Simmons’s bedside. She crouched, laid her hand on the blanketed shoulder, and hesitated again.  
This was the right thing to do, wasn’t it? After all, the only reason Simmons wasn’t allowed in the lab was because she kept knocking things over and endangering herself. If Skye was there with her, she could totally catch her. Simmons was short. If all those pull-ups weren’t good enough to catch a five-foot-four nerd who’d been malnourished for two months, they weren’t good for anything.

“Rise and shine, Boothroyd,” she whispered, shaking Simmons, who grunted and opened her eyes.

“What?”

“Still want to get into the lab?”

Simmons sat up blearily and dragged on her robe, tying it around her waist. She swayed a bit, but it looked more like the not-yet-awake kind of sway than the imminent-blackout-and-or-vomit kind of sway, so Skye keyed open the door and led the way to the stairs. They crept past Fitz’s bunk and Skye’s empty one, and Skye was just happy they didn’t have to get past Ward’s. Dude slept way too light, which was probably why he was so grumpy all the time.

Skye went down the spiral stairs first, holding onto the railing on both sides in case Simmons felt like starting up a game of Katamari and rolling them both down the stairs. They reached the lab without incident, and Skye tapped in the override code she’d programmed, and they were in.

As the sterile air and bright incandescent lighting sucked them in, doors closing behind them like rippling panes of water, Simmons seemed to wake up. She stood a bit straighter, rubbed at her sunken eyes, and unbelted her rose dressing gown. Skye perched herself on one of the high, cushioned stools and leaned her elbows back on the counter.

Simmons had gone into action, muscle memory and instinct taking control of the zombie-like state she’d been in the past few days. She snapped on her black gloves and powered up a few devices Skye had seen her use a few times before. She had no idea what they did, but before she could decide whether or not to bother Simmons with questions, a yawn stretched her jaw and brought tears to her eyes.

Nope. Knowing Simmons, her idea of an explanation would be more confusing than the cheek-swab-goes-on-petri-dish-which-goes-under-microscope-then-in-the-spinny-thing-and-expecto-patronum-something-happens business Skye saw well enough on her own. There was definitely less brain-stress involved in watching Simmons flit around in blue striped pajamas and bedroom slippers, sticking herself with needles and staring at color-changing strips of paper, waiting for her to look up with a smile and tell her everything was going to be all right--that she’d figured it out.

But the last part didn’t happen. Even when Skye jerked awake as her phone alarm beeped, warning her their time window was coming to a close. She grunted, looked at the screen. It was 5 a.m..

“Simmons, did you find any-”

But Simmons’s back was to her, and she somehow looked smaller than ever with her dark blonde hair tangled down the back of her shapeless navy top, shoulders rigid.

“I did find something,” she said. “But it’s definitely not what I expected.” She turned to face Skye, and the raw red beneath her eyes contrasted with the grayish pallor of her skin. Then, impossibly, she smiled, and the movement of her cheeks displaced some of the tears standing in her eyes. “Of course, my reading is probably off. I don’t really have the ability to run the appropriate diagnostic on myself, but the ultrasononic technology we have is generally used in processing liquids, so I’ll have to see if Fitz can calibrate it to measure at 20kHz and put out a graphic to really be certain, but I’m afraid to even ask him, since-”

“Simmons!” Skye interrupted. “Can’t you just tell me what it is?”

Simmons opened her mouth again, looked away, and shook her head. “No. I’m not sure. I mean, I’ve identified a few things I can certainly flush out of my system.”

Panic crept up Skye’s back, prickling on her neck. “Well, can’t you do something about those?”

Simmons pointed at a number of vials and syringes on the work-station. Skye crossed the distance between them and dropped her voice, paranoid that somehow Ward or May’s bat-hearing would detect them, though she was probably saying the first smart thing she’d said all day.

“We have to tell someone. Coulson, or maybe May.”

Simmons still wasn’t looking at her, though she swiped delicately at the tears gumming her lower lashes, flicking them away with her black gloves. “I suppose you’re right,” she said. “But I’m not sure what to tell them.”

“Maybe that we need to get you to the nearest S.H.I.E.L.D. medical facility to get an actual, like, full-body whatever done? Simmons, you’re, like, wasting away. You can barely keep anything down. I mean, maybe that’s normal after the kind of stuff they did to you, but it doesn’t seem right for you to be up here on the bus with people who don’t know how to take care of you!”

“I don’t want to leave, Skye!” Simmons said, and her gloved fingers snatched at Skye’s jacket and held on, her voice trembling despite the defiant flash in her eyes. “What if they want to keep me there for testing and you all get called out on a mission? I was gone for two months. I don’t want to be in some other lab with some other scientist running dozens of other tests. I want to be in my lab. I want to control my own tests. I want to sleep in my own bed. I want to be with the people who make me feel like I’m at home.”

Skye lifted her arms and wound them around Simmons’s thin shoulders, hugging her chill body. Simmons pressed her face into Skye’s shoulder, shaking so hard her teeth chattered. The trembling might be from cold rather than fear. In fact, given that it was Simmons and the girl had the adamantium ovaries to leap out of a plane, Skye was willing to bet it was mostly the temperature of the lab.

Skye pulled away, hair catching on Simmons’s button for a second. She reached for the rosy pink robe and handed it to Simmons.

“You know,” she said. “I think Coulson would understand you not wanting to leave the bus. I mean, we don’t really want to let you out of our sight either. I think Fitz would spontaneously develop superpowers and go Dark Side. Just saying.”

“Yes, but,” Simmons gave a soft, hiccupping laugh, “Darth Fitz doesn’t sound very intimidating, does it?”

***

“What do we even know about the Gemini Project?” Ward said, arms crossed as he glared down at the three-dimensional holograph of the compound as if it’s architecture might cough up answers. He needed to ask questions and get answers, and while the intel from their  recovery mission had been enough to get in, get Simmons, and get out, it hadn’t been enough to tell them why she’d been taken in the first place, or what exactly had been done to her.

“From the outside, the project looks benign,” Coulson said. “They’re a small company just gaining traction in the international pharmaceuticals field for leading research and technology for combatting everything from cancer to the common cold. Gemini, the twins, is meant to symbolize the dual nature of the company: pharmaceuticals on one side, and on the other, technology.”

Ward grunted, zooming in on the lab they’d found her in.

“The FitzSimmons of medicine,” May said. “But why would a medical research facility kidnap a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and run tests on her. If they’d wanted to force her to work with them, I could understand, but they used her like a lab rat.”

“They wanted to draw us out,” Coulson said. “By now, anyone with enough intel on our operation will know we don’t abandon our own.”

“Anyone with that sort of intel would also know how it ended for the other guy,” Ward pointed out. “I don’t think they were trying to draw us out. Why remove her tracker? Why work so hard to keep her dark for that long? There has to be something about Simmons that made them target her.”

“Exactly,” Coulson said. “I don’t know if we can rule out her brain yet.”

“Have you gotten the results of her physical?” May asked, and Ward saw her gaze flick to the stairwell. “No,” she held up a hand, and a moment later, Fitz ascended the stairs from the lab, lugging an armload of equipment back toward the lounge area.

Coulson leaned in, and Ward angled himself closer as the senior agent dropped his voice to a murmur. “Nothing yet, which either means they’re trying to figure out how to box me in, or…”

“Or it’s not something they’ve seen.”

“I could do some reconnoissance,” Ward said finally, unable to hold back the urge to act any longer. “Infiltrate and find out what’s on their mainframe. Between Skye and Simmons, I’d be able to get whatever information I need.”

“Agent Ward, no one goes into Gemini until we figure out what’s going on. I know Simmons ran some tests last night, so we’ll wait and see what she’s come up with.”

“You let her back in the lab?” Ward said. “She’s not ready to-”

“You didn’t,” May said, her eyes narrowing at Coulson. “Someone must have helped her get past the lockout protocol.” Ward sighed, exasperation tinged--as much as he hated to admit it--with relief flooding through him as he realized it.

“We need to hire a baby sitter,” he muttered.

“Or a firing squad.”

“What we need is answers,” said Coulson. He tapped his intercom. “Fitz, Simmons, Skye--I need you in command right now.”


	3. Revelation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jemma reveals what she's discovered about the tests the Gemini Project ran on her, and the possible repercussions.

“So, wait, what are you making?” Skye said, leaning across the lounge table to peer at the tablet screen as Jemma made notes from her reference. They’d taken to sitting out here in the lounge, since Jemma wasn’t technically allowed in the lab, and though May had rolled her eyes at the sight of Jemma’s chem kit on their breakfast table, she hadn’t exactly stopped them.

“I’m creating a transductor gel,” she said, measuring out water into a beaker. “Propylene glycol is miscible with water, so I’m just checking the proportions most commonly used to achieve the correct viscosity. Don’t want to make a mess.”

“Totally.” Skye said. Jemma looked up at her tone of confusion and glanced around for Fitz before remembering he was back in the lab. Though he’d claimed he could assemble most of the components there at the table with them, he’d needed to print the casings. When she’d asked about an ultrasonic imaging device, he’d gone into engineering mode, muttering about fourth-dimensional advances, and Jemma—satisfied he wouldn’t ask any difficult questions until later—had gone about her own task.

“So,” Skye continued. “What exactly does that mean you’re doing?”

“Ultrasonic imaging,” she said. “Magnetic resonance imaging just isn’t practical in a lab our size, but I need a clearer idea of what’s going on and, on the whole, I’d prefer not to attempt performing any sort of internal probe on myself.”

“Yikes, no. Okay. No more questions about that.”

“The doppler effect will work with 4-D imaging,” Fitz said, appearing from around the command station.

“What does that even mean?” Skye said.

“Et means,” Fitz heaved a box of mechanicals onto the table and sat down. “that the device puts out very high-frequency sound waves, which reflect off fluids and tissue, sort of like echo-location.”

As he began to pull components from the box, a faint trace of sweat moved through the air toward her, laced with the scent the familiar aftershave he’d worn as long as she’d known him. His sleeves and his hair always held the trapped smell of heated steel. They were smells that she had taken for granted, that she had missed for all those weeks without really missing them directly. But now that she smelled them, something in her chest clenched.

What the hell was her mind doing? She needed to focus on the problem, not the thought of how comforting that smell was in it’s familiarity. Fitz, apparently unaware of her sudden stillness, pulled a spool of solder from his box, “When the transductor receives the reflected sound waves, a computer renders them into an image. That used to be just two, dimensional, but now we can not only render that image in 3-D, but see it in real-time as well-”

“-effectively creating a four-dimensional image of the body’s internal structures,” Jemma finished.

Skye raised an eyebrow. “So, wait…like an ultrasound? Like when you-”

“Yes, precisely,” Jemma said, cutting her off with a slightly panicked glance toward Fitz. “There are hundreds of applications for sonographic technology.”

“And to help with that, you’re making…goo?”

“A transductor gel, yes,” she said. “Sound waves don’t travel well through air, and there are hundreds of tiny air pockets on human skin that could interfere with the reading, so it’s important for there to be a conductive medium to increase the reading’s accuracy.”

" _Fitz, Simmons, Skye,_ " Coulson’s voice spoke from the intercom on the wall, and they all looked at it. " _I need you in command right now._ "

Jemma exchanged a look with Skye, and Fitz narrowed his eyes shrewdly.

“This doesn’t have anything to do with ‘Don’t tell Fitz’, now does it?”

Jemma grimaced, “let’s hope not.”

Fitz closed his eyes and sighed, then scooted out of the booth and gestured Skye and Jemma ahead of him. She shifted down to the edge of the seat and stood. A swooping sensation went through her head, like someone had attached a weighted string behind her right ear and swung it, twisting her around. The next moment she was on her hands and knees, the image of her own pale hands on the floor torquing before her.

Hands were on her waist, pulling her back to a sitting position, and the twisting world sent her pitching sideways. Then she stopped. Through the dizziness, tightness registered around her shoulders, a forearm across her collarbone and pressure at her back, anchoring her with the knowledge that the world wasn’t spinning—just her.

“You’re okay, Jemma. Dr. Fitzy’s got you,” Fitz was saying in that tone of bracing humor he used when things went pear-shaped. He was kneeling behind her, one arm holding her back against him, steady, even if it didn’t feel that way. She smelled heated metal and his aftershave more strongly, his voice just behind her ear.

Jemma sucked in a breath and closed her eyes against the sight of Skye kneeling before her. “Just a—bit of a head-rush. Nothing to worry about.”

“I’ll get Coulson,” Skye said, and dashed around the barrier.

“You’re okay, Jem. You’re okay,” Fitz was saying. She nodded, turning her head so her forehead pressed against his jaw, which she somehow never expected to be so rough. Pain clenched her abdomen, sending sympathetic lances up into her lungs. She jerked, but pressed her lips together and didn’t make a sound. What was happening? The dizziness was fading, but she could feel her heart working overtime, and the clenches of pain were getting more intense. Fitz. She needed to talk this out. She needed him to listen.

“Nh,” came out instead of any actual words. His grip on her tightened. “Some of the alien substances I identified could have leeched more iodine from my system,” she managed. Another cramp, another sharp breath. “I noticed my levels were low last night, and one of the alien chemicals appears to be vaguely magnetic-”

“So it could be messing with your endocrine system?”

“I think so, and the hyperthyroidism could cause orthostatic hypotension.”

“This isn’t exactly a mild drop in blood-pressure,” Fitz said, just as several sets of footsteps approached. Jemma opened her eyes, glad to see most of the spinning had stopped. Fitz ducked under her arm as May knelt and together they hefted her up into the chair she had vacated. Jemma gripped the edge of the table, though Fitz stayed behind her, his shoulder pressing into her back, keeping her upright.

Coulson stepped forward, clasping his hands before him and giving her a look that was hard to interpret. But the instant she met his eyes, she realized he knew what they’d done, yet the slight tension in his lips, the scan of her face and body—told her he wasn’t precisely angry.

“What do you know?” he demanded, and Ward, behind him, drew his eyebrows together, frowning as he sketched his gaze over her.

Jemma swallowed, reaching up to brush sweaty hair back from her face. She couldn’t tell them everything she suspected, but what she knew for certain was bad enough. Another cramp drew her knees up a bit, and May’s hand gripped her forearm tighter.

She blew out a slow breath and composed herself. As lightly as possible, she began. “Since you already appear to know about my escapade to the lab last night-” Fitz let out a frustrated-sounding phrase that, despite being in Scottish Gaelic, she probably could have translated. “-I suppose it won’t hurt to tell you.”

She swallowed, daring a glance up at Coulson’s direct gaze. “I’ve identified a number of foreign substances present in my body, some of which are almost certainly Chitauri. Because of the antiserum’s neutralization of the virus, I already have alien antibodies present in my bloodstream. Those antibodies are not recognizing many of the substances as foreign elements, which is allowing the Chitauri elements to…” she searched for a laymen’s term, “…gain a foothold in the body.”

The body. Her body. But she couldn’t say that. It was much easier to disassociate, talk as if she were analyzing a problem from someone else. But the look of horror on Skye’s face made that harder.

“The interesting part is what’s happening with the cells where the Chitauri DNA has successfully integrated. The cells appear to mutate, then return to their previous state, but in fact the cellular makeup remains almost entirely Chitauri, though they still appear and function as a human’s the majority of the time.”

“The Chitauri are shapeshifters,” May said. “It’s possible the mutation is attempting to mimic its surroundings.”

“Yes, that’s what I-” she gasped, a hand going to her diaphragm. “That’s what I thought.”

“Wait, are you saying…” Skye looked between Coulson and Jemma, her dark eyes begging them to tell her she as wrong. “Are you saying whatever they did to you is turning you into some sort of Chitauri hybrid?”

Jemma almost laughed. “No, no,” she said, and felt tension release in Fitz’s shoulder behind her. “Well, not a proper hybrid anyway. Most of my white blood cells are recognizing the alien substances for what they are and attacking them. It’s only a small amount of cells that have been affected, less than one percent at the moment.”

“At the moment,” Ward said. “Could it get worse?”

“I’m working against that at the moment,” she said. “I’ve managed to stop it spreading any further, but I’ve got to create a drug that could stimulate my immune system to kill the mutated cells without negating the effects of the antiserum to the original Chitauri virus.”

Coulson nodded, crossing his arms. Everyone else was quiet as he regarded her, no one quite daring to interrupt his thought process.

“Jemma, you’re in no condition to be working on this alone.”

“Hey!” Fitz said. “She’s not exactly alone, thanks.” Jemma leaned back a bit, nudging his shoulder, though she wasn’t quite sure if she wanted the gesture to thank him or tell him to shut up. He turned a bit, one arm resting on the table, one on the back of the seat, both hands just barely in her line of vision. She felt him behind her, radiating warmth and annoyance in that way only Fitz seemed capable of doing all at once.

“I mean, she’s overtaxing herself,” Coulson said. “Sci-Ops is already working on the analysis of your physical, but they’re taking longer than expected. If what you’re saying is the case, you could benefit from more researchers helping you. There’s not a known time limit on this like there was with the virus. S.H.I.E.L.D. has resources that can help you.”

This was exactly what she’d been afraid he would say, but it was hard to find a logical argument against it. Really, there wasn’t a logical argument. There was only what she wanted, and what she wanted had nothing to do with reason.

“Sir,” she began, “I understand that going to a SHIELD medical facility is probably the best course of action at the moment, but…” she cut her glance to Skye, who sucked in both her lips, brows pushed together helplessly, and nodded. “If I could make a request—I would much rather stay here. I’ve only been back for a little over a week and I don’t quite have my feet under me again.”

“Literally,” Fitz said.

“I understand that, Jemma, and I’m certainly not asking you to leave. We don’t have a current mission. It shouldn’t be a problem to take a few days out of the sky and get you back on your feet again, upgrade a few things, get Skye her Level 1 training assessment.”

Jemma swallowed, but nodded. “Sir, could I…could I ask that…” Everyone was looking at her. Ward looked with an indecipherable expression. He had said she was brave. Would he rethink that analysis if she said what she wanted to say? Would May give her one of those penetrating, x-ray vision looks that always seemed to come to the same conclusion: liability. Would Coulson, who had always treated her as a valuable member of the team, think she was weak? Skye would understand. Fitz would panic and put up a sardonic front, as usual. “No. Never mind. I understand, sir.”

“We’ll do everything we can to make you comfortable, Jemma.” Coulson’s voice had lost it’s edge, and something about his tone made her think he knew exactly what she had been about to ask. She was staring at his knees, and the sight of them blurred. Suddenly, irrationally, she missed her father.

“Yes, sir,” she said, her throat tight and throbbing. He turned to go, and a surge of urgency overtook her better senses. “There was…one more thing,” she said.

Coulson stopped, turned back around. Agent Ward turned with him.

“My analysis indicated another set of variables that, if I were to guess, are just a fluke of the fluctuating chemical reactions, but…” She swallowed, hyper-aware now of Skye’s fingers curled into the hem of her shirt, of the ripple of tension in May’s posture, of Fitz’s tie brushing against her back. “There is an abnormally high amount of progesterone in the reading. In conjunction with a number of other variables, the analysis would seem to indicate-”

“Are you shitting me?” Skye interrupted, and Ward took a step toward her. “Dude, you’re creating a freaking ultrasound thing and using all that science-language to talk around the fact that you think you might be some walking womb for an evil organizations fucked-up alien experiment?” She tried to take a step forward, but Ward pulled her back. She fought him without much conviction. “Why didn’t you tell me that’s what you were upset about?” she said, her voice breaking.

Ward froze, a startled expression arresting the strong angles of his face as he stared at Skye like she might explode or, worse, cry.

“It’s probably a fluke, Skye!” Jemma said. “I just wanted to be certain before I alarmed anyone, which I’ve obviously done anyway.” She glanced sideways and saw that, while Coulson’s expression hadn’t changed, his fists were clenched at his side and May’s hand had gone to his arm as if to restrain him.

“But how is that even… does that mean…what does that mean?” Skye blundered.

“It means I’ve got to finish making the gel and Fitz has to finish making the sonograph, and once that’s done, I should be able to rule it out.”

“And what if it isn’t a fluke,” May said softly.

Jemma swallowed and gave a nervous laugh. “I’m trying not to think about that.”

Fitz’s silence from behind her was ominous, as were the hands that were still slack on the table and chair back. Those hands that always moved when he talked and fidgeted when he didn’t, that illustrated physics and assembled everything from communicators to guns to six-story card-castles with steady precision, were silent. His gold watch, a gift from his grandfather, ticked away the silent seconds.

“Figure it out,” Coulson said. “Get back to us as soon as you know. May, set a course for the hub.” He disappeared toward his office and May, with one last concerned look at Jemma, headed for the cockpit. Skye, who had seemed to get herself a little more under control, stepped toward her, but Ward’s hand on her shoulder redirected her and pushed her back toward Command and the stairs down to the lab and the training area.

Jemma swallowed, and the soft ticking of Fitz’s watch filled the silence again. At least the cramps had seemed to fade, and besides a prevailing exhaustion threatening to close her eyes right where she sat, she felt much better than she had a few minutes ago. Perhaps the relief of telling them had been enough. But a different anxiety was fluttering through her now.

She took a breath and decided it didn’t matter what she said, as long as she broke the silence. She turned in the booth until she faced him and met his eyes. His features were rigid, the slight shadow of stubble under his cheekbones sharpening the look of his face. She knew him so well, yet she couldn’t tell if he was angry, or if it was her fear that he was angry making her see a slight chill in that blue gaze.

“Fitz,” she said. “I didn’t want anyone to over-”

“Hypotension,” he interrupted, and it took a moment for the word to sink in. Low blood-pressure, the same sort of low blood-pressure she had blamed for her vertigo. “Isn’t it a common side-effect of, you know…”

“Pregnancy, Fitz, and yes—I know, but there are loads of things that could be causing all of this,” she said, the edge of uncertainty in her voice didn’t fool either of them. Fitz’s hand slid from the table and came to rest on her knee. He squeezed it, and let go, reaching for the piece of the ultrasound transductor he had abandoned.

“Let’s rule it out, then.”


	4. Resistance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ward resists his own need for comfort, and his feelings, as he exercises his less-than-stellar interpersonal skills to keep Skye from blowing up, melting down, or skinning her knuckles on a punching bag.

Grant kept a hold on Skye’s shoulder until they got to the metal staircase leading down to the lab and training area. With her in front of him, he couldn’t see her face. That was a relief, because if she was as upset as the clenched, trembling fists let on, he didn’t want to make eye contact. If she was angry, she had an uncanny ability to evoke that same anger in him. Seeing fear or sadness in her dark eyes stirred the coals of protectiveness he’d tried to douse long ago, after his little brother, brought that fire back and made him want to pull her into his shadow, where he could get between her and whatever could hurt her.

Of course, he felt that way about all the kids. Jump out of a plane for Simmons? No problem. Send Fitz ahead to escape while he took the brunt of the enemy backlash? Well, he’d tried.

Still, with Skye it was different, and as much as he didn’t want to be honest with himself, he knew the dangers of denial. She got to him. Got under his skin like no one else, frustrated and annoyed and amused and impressed him in equal measure. But it was times like this, when she was shaking from whatever passionate reaction had overcome her, that being around her was like striking a match in a coal mine. He burned to spring into action, do _something_ to neutralize the threat and bring her back down to the comfortable zone of goofy and cocky. Goofy and cocky he could deal with. Goofy and cocky, and he could keep his poker face, or else mask his amusement with a sigh and an eyeroll.

She stepped down, out from under his hand and her sneakers sent muffled metallic clangs on the spiral stair as she tore down it. The intensity of her focus sent of warning bells.

“Skye,” he said, preparing to leap over the rail and drop if necessary, but the instant his head cleared the floor, he watched her launch herself at the punching bag still chained up from their morning training. He stopped, staring with a building panic as she slammed her fists into the bag, her knees, her elbows. A small tingle of pride wormed its way into the alarm as he realized that at least some of the Muy Thai he’d taught her was part of muscle memory.

Aikido, Muy Thai, Judo--disciplines that would help a smaller person, one without May’s precision and strength, subdue attackers and get away. She was learning.

But was she learning fast enough?

The image of Simmons’s limp form over May’s shoulder, the chill of her in his arms as he carried her out of the Gemini compound, registered in his memory, and his brain offered up a version where it was Skye, the gleam gone from her dark eyes, her quick hands limp and lifeless. Hands that were now skinning themselves as they pummeled a punching bag without so much as a cloth wrap.

A spasm passed over his face, and he was down the stairs, body reacting before his mind caught up. He grabbed her arms, ignoring her attempt to shake him off, and dragged her back. “Skye, Skye! Stop.”

“-the fucking _hell_ can someone be that _sick_.” Her voice was rough-edged and shrill with rage. He knew that chest-melting fury. Too well.  “She’s a fucking double-PhD in biochemistry and they can’t think of anything more useful to do with her than put a fucking mutant baby inside her? Are you _shitting_ me? This is so fucking CAVEMAN. This is--ugh, Ward, let _go_!”

“Skye, I understand. I know, just-” she drove her heel onto his foot, which didn’t so much cause him to let go as it took him by surprise. With heels on, that might have been effective. With battered Chuck Taylors, it was almost laughable. The elbow in his gut, less so.

Then his center of gravity was somewhere else. Muscle memory saved him, and he landed on his feet, twisted his arm in her grip and reversed the hold, dragging her roughly against him and locking her other arm behind her.

“Calm. Down.” He said, profoundly thankful his training was taking over where social skills were apparently failing miserably. Her hair was caught in his watch, but she seemed not to care as she glared up at him. The makeup under her eyes had migrated a bit, shifting down to give her slight shadows, and it glimmered a bit through the moisture trapped in her lashes. Perfect. The angry tears. He _hated_ the angry tears.

“I can’t take this,” she said. “I can’t take knowing what they might have done to her. Stupid fucking patriarchical bullshit rat-bastards.”

“I know.”

“She’s not a fucking test-tube.”

“No,” he agreed, relaxing his grip a bit. The tension in her body was beginning to unwind as she vented, and he didn’t want to hurt her. She sniffed, her dark eyes cutting to the lab doors a few feet away. Another blink sent a tear skating off her cheek. She moved the arm he had pinned up behind her and he relinquished it, but couldn’t quite bring himself to take his hand away from her back after. She brought her hand up between them and swiped at the wet track on her face. She sniffed again, then took a deep breath and let out a frustrated sigh.

“You going to start hitting the bag without hand-wraps again, or can I let go?”

“I threw you.”

“I’m impressed.”

“Why’d you have to land on your feet. Couldn’t you have just, like, pity-fallen or something?”

“Sorry, grasshopper.”

“Did you just make a Karate Kid reference?”

“Possibly.” She was relaxing a bit, leaning her weight into him in a way that made him at once reluctant and anxious to step away. He let go of her forearm and reached around to disentangle his watch from her hair. Girl hair, everything except practical for fighting. Cool, coarser than he’d imagined looking at it, the loose curls pliant in his fingers. Right. Observation skills needed to take a hike just now. They were not useful in this situation.

Her face pressed into his shoulder, both of her hands finding his jacket and holding on. His posture stiffened, but if she noticed, she didn’t care.

“I know it’s a high-risk job,” she said, her voice muffled, the heat of her breath catching in the knit of his shirt, holding her words against him seconds after the sound of them faded. “I just never thought… I mean, there are some things that shouldn’t be messed with. There are lines.” Her forehead pressed against his collarbone, and her cheek and nose made a familiar yet foreign geometry where they sank against him. His pulse spiked, despite the dense yoke of dread and anger still hanging on his shoulders.

He couldn’t take it anymore. It was either hold her or back off, and his hands were making the decision for him, following instinct, though one that was different from that on which he usually relied. His fingers slid under her hair, curving around the back of her neck. His other hand stroked over her head and came to rest on her shoulder blade.

He was tense, breathing mechanically, but at his touch, she seemed to lose the last of her bravado. He practically felt it unspool under his hands as she sank against him. Skye said something unintelligible, releasing his jacket and sliding her arms inside it, around his waist, pulling herself against him. His senses went into overdrive, noting everything from the pulse behind her ear, to the shudder of every breath, and how that swell and shrink of her ribs brought her tighter against him, then gave him an instant’s relief from having to forcibly not notice how _that_ made him react, then tight against him where he could feel every swell and plane with alarming accuracy.

He felt suddenly conflicted--on the one hand as horrified as she at what had been done to someone under his protection, on the other hand, simultaneously riveted and terrified by the girl holding herself tight against him, shaking with impotent anger and, by extension, fear. The riveted part bothered him most, made him feel a stab of guilt that an aspect of him--the aspect that was a man with a beautiful woman pressed hard against him--wanted to hold her for reasons that had nothing to do with Simmons, or even with soothing her at all, that same part that made his arms and hands go a little weak, palms aching to feel her hair, the curve of her back, her skin.

He took her upper arms in his hands, intending to hold her away from him, but her fingers curled in his shirt, clenching at the small of his back as if to let him know that if he wanted to push her away, she would fight it. And he couldn’t do it.

What was it about Skye that he couldn’t stop responding to? She was not the most beautiful girl he’d worked with (though he was struggling to remember who that was exactly) and in personality, she was so far from what he’d always thought his type might be. But maybe that was exactly it. She was so idealistic and fresh, a change of pace and temperature, a daily challenge to his way of thinking and reacting and being that forced him to expand himself in order to meet her half way.

And that was exactly what he’d always done with himself, mentally and physically. Exactly what he loved about the job.

Exactly what he wasn’t prepared for when it came to a woman he wanted to take care of.

She believed in sacred ground. In lines drawn in the sand. In ethics and morals and freedom of information. In humanity being, as much as the evidence was against her, good at it’s core.

“There aren’t lines,” he said. “Not to some people. That’s the risk we take--the reason we’re called S.H.I.E.L.D.. When you stand between the threat and the thing you want to protect--”

“Shut up, Ward.”

He took a breath, thought better of it, and pressed his face to the top of her head. It wasn’t a kiss, just a few moments breathing her in, letting his own breath get caught in her hair. Her hands relaxed, slid flat up his back and held him, hollowed him out for just a second and made him want to lean against her too, let the feeling of her willow-strong figure in his arms take away some of the sharpness of the guilt still gnawing a hole in his chest.

“Why are we fighting to protect a world where people like that exist?” she whispered, and the words caught in the cotton with an echo of heat.

Grant spoke six languages, but couldn’t find an answer in any of them.


	5. Reason

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fitz struggles with feelings of helplessness as he helps Jemma with her analysis.

He was usually good at shutting out everything that didn’t have to do with the job at hand. He was usually good at losing himself in the beauty of efficient design, in the comforting predictability of velocity and thrust and nine-point-eight meters-per-second-squared. He liked the feeling of casing neatly-bound wires in a neat plastic tube--the finishing details. He liked geometric designs and predictable patterns. He liked order. He liked logic. He liked mathematical precision.

Decommission a doomsday device onsite with no extraction plan and rewire it into a portable electrostatic cannon? Not a problem. Locate a mineral solution to suspend an antiserum and deliver it through electrostatic shock, with a timer counting down to his partner’s death? Harder, but he’d still managed to focus. It was like school, focusing on the formulas for rocket fuel as the other uniformed boys in his class shouted insults, or bounced a football off the back of his head.

This was different. There was no deadline. Just a familiar girl and a deep pit in his stomach, a consistent baseline of dread. She looked like a slip of nothing in front of him. He’d never been considered tall, but in that moment, she seemed tiny. Black leggings and sports-bra on a figure so spare and cold he almost wished she’d never shrugged off the pink dressing gown. Almost, but now he could see for himself the bruises on her arms where the intravenous drips had been, the discoloration of a cracked collarbone--relic of her initial capture.

Of course he’d thought about her in this sort of style before. She had always been pretty, and it wasn’t like he hadn’t noticed that--especially at first. And lately, with their relationship moving simultaneously toward more comfortable and less definable (and therefore incongruously less comfortable for its lack of a neat label), he’d caught himself noticing the slips of skin. The hollow of her throat, when her collar shifted aside, the pale flash of her back when she reached for a beaker at the back of the shelf. The shape of her in her patterned shirts and jumpers, somehow so much better for the sweet ache of not knowing what was there.

Seeing her like this, a good seven or eight kilograms lighter than she should have been, he couldn’t care that she was more naked than he’d ever seen her. She was gray and sharp, her whisky-bright eyes focused on him with a combination of defiance and pleading.

He held out a hand. She stepped forward and slid her cool fingers into his, and they stood a moment, squeezing and staring at each other, sharing the last few moments of ignorance. He ran his thumb over the writing callus below the last knuckle of her middle finger, felt the softness of the rest of her palm catch on his rougher one, and had trouble keeping the rage at bay.

She was barefoot, her eyebrows level with the end of his nose, her bare shoulders scattered with a constellation of freckles. She would have fit very easily into his arms just then, but the look in her eyes kept him from taking that step forward. She didn’t need a hug right now. She needed answers.

He turned to the lab’s longest table, over which he’d mounted the ultrasonic imager’s output screen. It was rigged on a crane-arm, which allowed her to adjust the angle downward so she could both recline and analyze the images. He still wasn’t certain what role she expected him to play in the procedure, though somehow the idea of even watching seemed terrifyingly personal.

She let go of his hand and turned to the table, placed her hands on its edge, which, being a standing work-table, was just over her bare midriff.

“Here,” he said, leaning down so she could put an arm around his shoulders. She hesitated, but did, and gave a little hop. He guided her onto the table, and they slid apart, her skin cold and textured with gooseflesh.

A wave of dread lapped at his toes, but Fitz took a deep breath and powered up the machine, testing the transductor’s button and the feed to the screen as Jemma, wordless as before, situated herself on the table. She’d set up a tray of instruments next to her--a beaker of her transductor gel, a syringe, gloves, a hand towel. Flat on her back on the metal table, knees bent and heels planted, she made him wish there were something more to concentrate on--some problem he could solve with gadgetry and science--something else besides her clenched jaw and wide eyes, besides the tremor in the hands that rolled down the waistband of her leggings and reached for the transductor gel.

He didn’t want to watch this. He had to know the truth. He stood paralyzed, hating himself, hating the Gemini Project, as the sight of her covering her abdomen in gel effectively loosened bolts holding back the tide.

“Okay,” she said, wiping her hands on the towel and holding one out. “May I have that, please?” Her voice was lower than normal, and she spoke past chattering teeth.

Fitz shook himself, forced a smile, and handed her the transductor. She pressed her lips, swallowed, and placed the end of the wand to her abdomen. He drew a breath.

“You don’t have to stay,” she said.

“Don’t be daft.”

“Fitz-”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said, louder than he’d intended because he was half telling himself. He stepped around behind the table, behind her head, kneeling to see the monitor. He reached for her shoulders, rested both hands on them. He heard her take a breath and blow it shakily out through her mouth.

He felt pressure rising in his chest, and with a click, the screen came to life.

“Oh...wow,” he heard her breathe, and for a moment they both watched as the landscape of her appeared, three-dimensionally-rendered. He had no clue what he was looking at, but the effect was certainly cool. He squeezed her shoulders in agreement.

From his vantage kneeling behind her head, he couldn’t quite see what she was doing, but her shoulders moved beneath his fingers and the angle of the picture changed, revealing another series of mysterious shapes and movements.

She froze. He stopped breathing, gaze hunting on the screen for what she had seen. She lifted a hand, pointing at a shape on the screen, and he saw it--embryonic and distorted, but all the more unmistakeable.

“ _Ich werde diesen Scheißkerl Projekt auseinander zu nehmen mit einem Kreuzschlitz-Schraubendreher und einer Lötlampe_ ,” he growled.

“Fitz,” she said, an odd catch in her voice despite the usual tone of reprimand.

“Sorry.”

“There…” her slender finger moved a centimeter across the screen. “There are...two of them.”

Shock and anger were twin pulses in his brain. The slow-warming skin under his fingers a contrast to the deepening chill engulfing him. She began to shake, the transductor moving left, then right, but Fitz understood none of what appeared on the screen. It wasn’t until he felt her jerk and shudder that he looked back up and saw her groping for the hand towel, the monitor blank, transductor lying at her thigh.

“Jemma.” He stood, though he felt as if all the bolts were loose inside his chest, leaving his heart to clang around empty and cold inside the hollow cavity. he reached for the cloth, skirted around the tray and stood at her side. He pushed the monitor away, pressed the cloth into her hands and stared at her face, which was pinched, here eyes trapped shut by a constant leak of liquid that dripped into her ears and hair. “Jemma,” he repeated, lower, as gently as he could say it. She curled her fingers around the towel, but made no other response.

He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t watch her like this. Her pain wasn’t something he could fix with solder and propane and neat calculations--he didn’t have the tools to help her, and that helpless feeling was slowly dismantling him.

“Fitz,” she said, and he’d never heard his name said like that before. A croak.

“I’m here, Jem,” he said, and damn the transductor gel. He leaned over her, hands on either side of her face, thumbs rubbing at the tears and combing back into her hair. He kissed her forehead, her closed eyelid. She twisted on the table, turning onto her side and pushing her face into his neck. He felt her drag in a rough breath, and braced himself.

She didn’t scream, not like he wished he could. Instead, she let it out and then, softly, whispered, “I don’t know how to write this report,” and the hot, silent tears that soaked into his shirt loosened the last bolt.

This. Was not. Okay.


	6. Mythology

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jemma reveals the results of her tests to the team, and May helps to unravel possible motivations behind the Gemini Project's actions.

Even without the three-dimensional rendering of the twin embryos hovering over the holocom table, May would have known by their faces what the outcome of the tests had been. The team all had taut cheeks and clenched jaws, eyes reflecting back the deceptively beautiful lights of the hologram like those of wild, frightened animals.

Simmons turned and expanded the image with efficient movements, pointing out the places where the fetuses had mutated away from the norm for humans, and what changes that was ostensibly encouraging in the small percentage of her cells that appeared to be mutable. Her voice was low, a little thick, trembling as she put more force into her voice than it could really sustain. The poor girl.

There was really only need to look at one other person. May cut her gaze to Coulson, unsurprised to find him stiff, tight-lipped, with only his sharp eyes moving and dissecting. The others might not see it, but fury rose from him like smoke, and May knew that at least part of what fed that flame was guilt. His team--people he felt were under his command and therefore under his protection--had been hurt. There was only so much anyone could insist that Simmons’s abduction had not been his fault. He’d reach back to his choice to recruit her if he had to, just to find a reason to blame himself. That was Phil. Taking responsibility for everything from Skye’s illegal movie downloads to El Niño and the Chitauri Invasion.

“That explains ‘Gemini’,” Ward said, breaking the silence. “I think we can all agree on the obvious connection to twins.”

“Except they’re not precisely twins,” Simmons said. “Look at the cranial discrepancy between this one,” she indicated the curled, embryonic form on the left of the projection, which looked pretty much like any rendering of a fetus she’d seen before, “and this one.” Simmons’s finger moved through the glowing points of light to indicate the second fetus. 

May slid her gaze over the image, but where her mind expected a smooth curve like the first fetus, her eyes picked up a different image. “It’s distended here, but not enough to be worrying. However, if we turn on the temporal fourth-dimension element,” she pulled her hands through the projection to clear away everything but the highlighted fetuses, then pressed a command on the sensor.

May felt all her muscles coil, reacting before her brain had even processed what she was seeing. The first fetus was still, looking like a tiny seahorse of a person. The second, however, was shifting--its head morphing ever so slightly, as if fighting against its own shape.

“It’s trying to look human,” Coulson said. “Shifting itself to match its environment.”

“It’s remarkable, really, to be so adaptable,” Simmons said. “I’d say they’re only about six weeks along--quite a delicate gestational stage, yet it’s already advanced enough to attempt to match its surroundings. Still, I’d think that might make it a bit unstable, which explains some of the side effects.”

May felt a surge of warmth toward the girl, whose passion seemed to be utterly bulletproof, though the reality of the situation was horrific enough to pierce anyone’s armor.

“I still don’t understand what the point of there being two is,” Skye said. “I get where they’re trying to make a Chitauri-human chimera thing, but I don’t get what’s up with there being two. I mean, that’s not normal for artificial…” her dark gaze cut to Simmons. “I mean. It was...artificial?”

Simmons waved her hand, grimacing. “Yes, of course it was. I think I’d remember if it wasn’t. Or notice afterward, anyway.” She shook her head, giving a shudder. “And now I have a few new mental images for my nightmares. Cheers for that.”

“Sorry, I just...I mean, if they’d go this far…” Skye let her words trail off.

“I’m assuming the second one is there as a sort of control for the experiment,” Fitz said, speaking for the first time. There was a rough edge to his voice, as if someone had eaten away at it’s softer edges with acid. May had the impression he was attempting to shift attention back to scientific questioning and away from Simmons herself, and the subtle touch of her hand on his back confirmed that.

But Skye’s words had stirred a memory in May’s head.

“The Gemini,” she said, and all five of the others glanced up at her through the still-moving projection. “Castor and Pollux. They were the twin sons of Leda, after she was raped by Zeus in the form of a Swan.”

“I’m sorry, did you say a _swan_?” Skye said. Simmons rolled her eyes even as Ward put a hand on Skye’s arm and said, “not now.”

But May had turned, as ever, to Coulson. His eyes were gleaming again, and she knew he’d picked up on what she was hinting at. “In the Greek Myth, the twin boys were born--sometimes hatched from an egg--and though Castor came out a normal human-”

“-except for the part where he hatched from an egg.”

“-Pollux was half-god. And together, they were thought of as the helpers of mankind. In the story, the human brother is fatally wounded and the divine brother is given the choice to live on Mount Olympus as a god, or share his immortality with his brother. He chose to divide it between them, and they lived half their time between Olympus and the underworld.”

“I see the parallel,” Coulson said, nodding. “One fully human, one at least part something else. What I don’t see is the connection.” His eyes gleamed as he studied the embryos, the corners of his mouth tucking in concentration. “An attempt to share out some of the superhuman powers with humanity? Creating superhuman hybrids? But why then create only one?”

“I think,” Simmons began, but stopped. May looked at her and saw that she had closed her eyes, gripping the sides of the table. She looked up again, studying the two fetuses. “I think there’ve included a human embryo, to give the Chitauri hybrid something to mimic. All these stories, the symbolism, the classical references, make a pretty explanation for something that really just comes down to biological experimentation.”

She was leaning a bit, her eyes unfocused. May watched Coulson reach out and take her elbow, steadying her on one side as Fitz moved closer on the other, not reaching for her so much as letting her bump into his shoulder. The vertigo, probably.

“So…” Skye said, as ever, voicing the question the rest of them were still trying to decide how to ask. “What are you going to do?”

May pressed her lips together, wondering if that was really something Skye should be asking in front of the whole team. The pressure was back on Simmons, drawing attention to the fact that the embryos were not just some third-party to be spoken of with scientific distance. They were there, inside Simmons, little alien children that she had never asked for, that were--however she denied it--killing her. It seemed pretty clear to May what needed to be done.

“I don’t know.”

The silence tightened as if a vacuum had formed between them all, erasing sound. They all stared at Simmons, who stared at the holograph she was once again manipulating and turning. The structures were becoming less familiar, then more familiar. She moved her the focus up from the fetuses, then left, zooming in on another highlighted area.

“It appears that--well, I should first say that the embryos appear to be about five weeks on, which means there were approximately three and a half weeks of unaccounted-for time. My theory is that they were looking not necessarily for a surrogate to, for lack of a better term, incubate the hybrid, but a source of human gametes that would create viable zygotes with the Chitauri’s.”

“Translation?” Coulson said, though May knew from the strain in his tone that he already guessed, and just wanted to be proven wrong.

Simmons took a deep, shaky breath, and for once her mask of scientific calm began to crack. She gave a bit of an apologetic smile, one that completely lacked humor, as her eyes went wet and her voice thick. “I think...the initial intention of my abduction was not this,” she gestured vaguely toward her abdomen, “but to see if my ovum might have been inured enough by the Chitauri virus’s antiserum to potentially create a viable hybrid embryo.”

“And they were obviously successful,” said Coulson.

“Obviously. So far. The problem is…” she paused, gasped. “The problem is, there isn’t… well, they obviously had to do a number of tests first, and I’m guessing their initial attempts at insemination took some work to perfect, and then of course, they would have tried test-tubes and incubators first, which means they’d have needed a large enough sample size to work with, so…” she gestured again at the hologram. “Nothing. They’re gone. All of them.” She swallowed. “Therefore, I don’t know what-” her voice broke “wh-what I’m going to-”

May watched it happen, watched the realization sink in, weighing down Jemma’s shoulders and curving her her back over the table, as the rest of the team stared on in horror. The Gemini Project had not just made her the surrogate mother of an alien hybrid, they had stolen all her eggs and fused them with Chitauri.

Jemma Simmons, the brilliant rising star in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Sci-Ops division, wouldn’t get another chance to have a child of her own. Simmons had covered her face with both hands, shielding it from view as she gasped and bent over the projector, interrupting the hologram of her luminescent internal landscape. Skye was silent, her hand over her mouth, hand groping for Ward’s forearm. Coulson was still supporting Simmons on one side, his jaw set in rage, free hand already going to his cell phone.

But Fitz was the worst. His expression was blank, his body rigid next to Simmons as he stared at her shuddering and gasping, desperately trying to reel her emotions back in as her team looked on, observing perhaps the most horrifying personal moment of her life. He looked as though he’d been stabbed through the heart with a Chitauri scepter.

“Move,” May said, pushing past Coulson and taking Simmons’s elbow. She slid an arm aorund Simmons’s waist, pulling her away from Fitz and the others, leading her down the hallway to their bunks. As they got farther from the team, Simmons’s resolve seemed to unravel. By the time May opened her door, the girl had her arms wrapped around her middle, bent forward, heaving almost silently with sobs.

“Shhh,” May said, tapping the door panel so it slid closed. She pulled Simmons down onto the side of the bed and wound her arms around her. She rocked her a bit, feeling the shudders of her frail form, the drip of hot tears onto her neck. There was nothing to say about any of it. No words of comfort, no way to help her grieve or relieve her of the decision she had to make. So May said nothing. When Simmons finally pulled away and reached for her pajamas, May stood, gave her shoulder one last squeeze, and slipped from the room.

She had no doubt that Simmons was not done crying, but she knew what it was to crave solitude for grief. Sometimes, it was easier not to have witnesses.


	7. Respite

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jemma allows herself to react to what was done to her, and Fitz gives her a silent anchor.

Jemma heard her pod door open but didn’t turn over to face it. She lay curled on her side in bed, her forehead pressed against the chill wall, knees tucked up. The fetal position. Her mind had toyed with that thought for a while. She was curled in her bed the way the two fetuses were curled up inside her. It wasn’t funny, even remotely, and she brushed it aside. Her body was exhausted, hollowed out and trembling from the exertion of the emotional storm that had passed through her, a storm that had been too large to find the edges of, and which still rumbled distant, thunderous peals of grief through her.

The pod door closed, cutting off the shaft of dim hallway light. Someone took steps toward her with heavy-treaded shoes, and she couldn’t summon the energy to turn her head to see who it was. The person hesitated next to her bed, then sank onto the mattress behind her.

Fingers threaded through her hair, and though her sinuses were still too blocked up to confirm, she was sure she would have smelled the fain scents of solder clinging to the cuffs. She sniffed, hugging herself a bit as the person behind her sighed, leaned into her back, and pressed his face against her shoulder.

“Jemma,” he whispered, voice muffled against her pajama top, though the heat of his breath passed through the fabric. It seemed to melt a hole in the patina of frost slowly growing over her body. She inhaled slowly, fully intending to respond, but the breath went nowhere. She couldn’t do it. Then that warm breath was in her ear, trembling the hair around her face. “Jemma,” Fitz said, his hand gripping her arm gently, then chafing it, as if he could feel the cold. “Talk to me?”

She took another breath, but it failed her as well. Fitz sighed, and the warmth of that exhale on her face made her want to reach for him. She did, just slightly, working her fingers up to close around his hand on her arm.

“Do you want me to stay or go?” he asked, turning his palm up to catch her fingers. She felt his chest pressing against the back of her shoulder as he propped himself on his elbow behind her, his nose tracing softly at the curve of her ear. It was a more intimate gesture than she could ever remember. She hated that she couldn’t appreciate it, couldn’t feel the frisson of excitement that his face was so near hers.

Part of her wanted him to go, to leave her and not force her to think about all the things that had already changed, all the differences she would have to come to terms with now. He was in that list of differences in her mind, with a big red question mark next to his name. The question mark had been there for a while, though not in the same sense. Fitz--her Fitz--she needed him to feel normal anymore. She always expected him to be there, close at hand, ready with an idea or an opinion, expanding and improving her the way she did him.

But this… what if she was asked to leave the Bus? What if he didn’t want someone who was no longer completely whole?

The sharp inhale was enough to help her whisper the word. “Stay.”

He nodded, or at least she thought he did, since his face moved against the side of her head. Next moment, though, he had shifted up. For a moment, she worried she hadn’t spoken loudly enough, but there was a soft thunk, followed by another. His shoes. The mattress shifted, and she saw out of the corner of her eye that he had shrugged out of his cardigan. His tie hissed from his collar, belt scraped in short fits from its loops. There was a bit of silence, and he stood up, footsteps making their way to a chair in the corner--placing his things out of the way, she realized.

Then he was back, a presence blotting out the openness of the room as he stood next to the bed, folded back the covers, and climbed in. His hand slid under the pillow, but she had already moved, somehow finding the energy to lift herself up, slide back into the arms that were even then winding around her.

The heat of him was a shock, the feel of him against her back, twining his legs with hers, clenching her wordlessly against him from ankle to chest, was somehow familiar despite its lack of precedent. He lifted a hand, swept her hair up, and she lifted her head so he could push the tangled mass up over the pillow and out of his face. He slid his arm back under her neck, and she hugged his forearm across her chest. His fingers  found her shoulder, his nose tucked behind her ear where she could feel her own pulse throbbing sluggishly.

He felt right. He leaned his weight into her back, and finally, trapped between her best friend and the wall of her bunk, it was safe enough to talk.

“The strangest part is, I never really knew if I even wanted children,” she said. He nodded, his chin rough against the nape of her neck. “I mean, with my career, and being on the Bus and in almost constant danger--case in point--I certainly wasn’t planning on them any time soon, but...I don’t know. I suppose I always saw myself as someday being-” she stumbled over the words, feeling the hitch in her breath as her stomach gave a spasm that was either sob or pain. “Even that’s a lie--I never decided. I never decided if I wanted children. It seemed premature when I wasn’t even… but now I don’t even have the option. This,” she let go of him with one hand and reached past his arm around her waist, sliding her palm under her night shirt and resting it on the spot just below her navel. “I’m not going to get another chance, so… I don’t know.”

She’d thought she was out of tears. Drained. Arid. Too exhausted to cry. But the tears came all the same, leaking across her nose and splashing down her pillow. Some of them slid onto Fitz’s bare arm. She hadn’t heard him take off the button down shirt, but he had stripped down to trousers and a dark undershirt. She swiped her fingers across the hot tear that had dripped onto his arm, but the fine, curly hair was already damp by the time she managed it.

“Whatever you decide to do...” he said, and let the statement trail off unfinished. It didn’t matter, she knew what he wanted to say, and the way his voice vibrated against her back was almost more comforting than the words themselves. Then his hand moved down, covering hers on her abdomen, and he sighed against the back of her neck.

Suddenly, Jemma was imagining a different scenario. One where the twins inside her were not scientific experiments, and Fitz, twined around her warm and solid and constant, didn’t have the burr of helpless, impotent anger scarring the edges of his voice. She shivered, stretching her fingers up to tangle with Fitz’s, struck with the sudden, soul-jolting understanding that, now, that could never be a reality.

“Fitz,” she croaked, and he was there, hugging her back against him, muttering things she couldn’t decipher into her neck as she clutched at his arms and trembled. She felt her face contorting around the heaving, silent sobs. It wasn’t fair. What they’d done to her was more than just use her as an experiment, they’d treated her as less than human, someth _ing_ and not some _one_ , and all because she had an immunity and a convenient womb.

They’d taken away something she couldn’t get back--cut her off from a choice she might have made without consultation or warning--and that, the sudden inability, made it hard not to imagine that she’d always secretly longed for children. She hadn’t. But now, with the ability literally stripped away from her, she was forced to dwell on it.

The tears dried up and her muscles went slack as exhaustion crept back in, stealing over her. Fitz had stopped talking, but his hand was still on her stomach, thumb rubbing slightly over the skin in a way that seemed to convey all the words she could sense trapped inside his chest. She was profoundly glad when he pressed his mouth to the back of her neck and of those words said only, “Get some rest, Jemma. I’m not going anywhere.”


	8. Reflect

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After learning of Simmons's true condition, Phil struggles with the question of what to do for his team member, and more importantly, what to do about the Gemini Project, which remains at-large.

Phil didn’t realize he was staring at his desk, fountain pen poised above the paper he was about to sign, until May’s entrance brought him back to it. His head ached a bit where his brow had knotted together, and he reached up to rub the crease that was ever more deepening into a worry line. What would he do if Simmons decided to risk her life to keep the children? Or even just the human control one? He couldn’t ask her to be involved on missions, not in any physically dangerous way. And after that? If she had a baby, would he have to ask her to leave the Bus? Would she be willing to stay and send the baby away?

 

What if she wasn’t? What if she left? They would be down one brilliant mind. Then again, Fitz had followed her here--who was to say he wouldn’t follow her out? Phil liked to think the young man’s loyalty to S.H.I.E.L.D. was his primary focus--he’d turned out to be much braver than Phil had initially thought--they both had. But he’d seen how Fitz rushed into a quarantined lab. You didn’t find a friend you were willing to die for very often.

 

May paced in, her movements controlled and graceful despite the injuries she’d sustained rescuing Simmons. She took a slow breath and let it out as she settled into the chair in front of his desk. “Running scenarios?” she asked.

 

Phil sighed and set down his pen. “Yeah,” he said. He shook his head. “Of all the scenarios I imagined having to deal with as a team leader, this wasn’t one of them. The Gemini Project took something from her that she can’t get back.” He looked back down at the paper, frowning deeply. “And I don’t know how to advise her, or how much of a right I have to give advice on this.”

 

He looked up, searching May’s familiar face as if he could read the answers in it, as if all the spidersilk lines that had appeared around her eyes and forehead over the years, mapping out their history together, might point him in the right direction. They didn’t, but her dark eyes were looking at him in sympathy, and for a moment he saw her as she’d been when they met: deep, laughing eyes and a quick smile, prone to random displays of affection that had just as often annoyed Phil as they had touched him.

 

Back then, he’d thought her a little frivolous. If he’d only known what she would become, he’d have appreciated those hugs and quick laughs a lot more.

 

“She doesn’t need advice right now, Phil,” May said. “She needs our support, in whatever she decides.”

 

Phil felt a pang in his chest, put his hand under his tie, over the scar, and massaged it. Sometimes he couldn’t tell whether those twangs of pain were physical or emotional, and had it been anyone but May in the room with him, he wouldn’t have drawn attention to it.

 

He nodded to the paper on the desk. “I’ve drafted a report to Director Fury and the SciMed teams at The Villa to let them know we’re coming. I’m not sure what Simmons needs, but considering the gravity of the experiment’s implications, I’m hoping Fury can give her more resources to work with.”

 

May nodded, then pressed her lips and glanced up at Phil with an odd look on her face.

 

“What?” he asked.

 

“It’s just...obviously, not the same thing, but… I do understand a little of what she’s going through.”

 

Another pang, this one duller, but much deeper than the last--an old ache making itself known. May. Sometimes he forgot how strong she was on the inside too, how much she’d gone through both before and after Bahrain.

 

“I know you do,” he said. “Did you tell her?”

 

May took in a deep breath and let it out again, shaking her head tightly. “If I’d thought it would help, I would have. But now’s not the right time.” She leaned forward. “I wanted to tell you that, if you’ve got any ideas about putting together an op for this, I’m in it one-hundred percent.”

 

He was still, not certain quite what to tell her after that. He had been considering putting together an op, but without more information, there was only so much they could do.

 

“We don’t even know if there was more than one lab,” he said. “Since you and Ward took out the first one, we might be out of the woods. On the other hand, someone with the resources to set up the operation in the first place, to kidnap Simmons right out from under us?”

 

“Are going to have enough resources for another lab,” May finished.

 

“At least. And why go to all the risk to get Simmons when there are other potential carriers of the virus who were given the antiserum by S.H.I.E.L.D.. Surely, one of those people would have been easier to take without fear of retaliation from S.H.I.E.L.D.--people disappear all the time. It doesn’t mean it’s a world-security issue.”

 

May leaned back, crossing her arms over her chest as she looked at him. “Maybe it wasn’t just that,” she said. “There are other factors to consider, especially when we’re talking about manipulating alien DNA. Simmons is a genius--seems like a useful trait for a superhuman.”

 

Coulson clenched his teeth. “I’d thought about that. I’m sure Simmons has too.”

 

“Skye is organizing all our data, searching for any other likely locations for a Gemini lab. Ward’s writing up his version of the rescue op report, making guesses about their man and firepower. We’re looking for starting points.”

 

“Good,” Phil said. “And Fitz?”

 

Fitz was the one he was most worried about, next to Simmons. After May had taken her out of the holocom room, Fitz had sagged against the table, hands going into his curly hair, and Coulson had feared a storm. To his surprise, it hadn’t come. Skye had put her hand on his arm, and she and Ward had dragged him to the onboard bar for a very generous glass of whisky.

 

May lifted her eyebrows, one corner of her mouth twitching wryly. “Where do you think?”

 

“The lab, or Simmons?”

 

“Simmons.” Her tone made it clear that what they had both wondered--what they’d exchanged glances over, if not words--was in play. Simmons was pregnant, not of her own choosing. She’d been experimented on, stripped of her ability to have any children but the two growing inside her now. And if Fitz really did feel for her the way Phil thought he did, of course that was going to hit him like a truck.

 

A beat of silence followed during which Phil fought with himself, not certain quite how he should feel about the fact that Simmons’s condition could very well bring all the underlying feelings they harbored to the surface.

 

But that was the part of him that thought like a team commander. The part of him that thought like a person, that exercised his empathy and reacted to things with a sense of moral justice, told him that Fitz was right where he needed to be.

 

“How long till touchdown?”

 

“Three hours.”

 

Phil nodded, pulling himself back in, drawing up straight as if a string pulled at the top of his head, reassembling the man that was Agent Phil Coulson.

 

“Tell Skye and Ward to have their information ready in two. Then get Simmons ready to go. I’d send Fitz with her for support, but I have a feeling we’re going to need him here.”

 

May stood up, nodding. “Yes, Sir.”

 

“And May,” he ventured, with a little twinge of apprehension. “I know it’s not easy for you to watch this, either.”

  
Another wry twitch of the lip. “At least this time I get to kick someone’s ass.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OH MY GOD. I'm sorry it's been so long since I've updated, but I really did mean it when I said I wasn't giving up on the fic. Even with all the changes that have happened in canon since I started (*cough* WARD *cough*), I'm going to keep on with the team as they were when I started. Which is, in some ways, a shame, because I really like Trip, even if he does sort of complicate the FitzSimmons thing.
> 
> Anyway, enjoy! More should be coming out soon.


	9. Off the Bus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jemma didn’t feel numb, exactly. Arid would have been a better word for it--burned dry by unforgiving sunlight, unable to sustain more than a few tough, sharp emotions that prickled and tore at anything that tried to come too close. Her eyes remained dry when Agent Coulson told Fitz he was needed to run point on the tech arm of the Gemini Operation. All she could do was nod and step away from the hand that reached for her shoulder.
> 
> She didn’t want comfort--not from Coulson, or Skye, or even Fitz anymore. Nothing good could survive inside her heart right now, not until she had answers.

Jemma didn’t feel numb, exactly. Arid would have been a better word for it--burned dry by unforgiving sunlight, unable to sustain more than a few tough, sharp emotions that prickled and tore at anything that tried to come too close. Her eyes remained dry when Agent Coulson told Fitz he was needed to run point on the tech arm of the Gemini Operation. All she could do was nod and step away from the hand that reached for her shoulder.

She didn’t want comfort--not from Coulson, or Skye, or even Fitz anymore. Nothing good could survive inside her heart right now, not until she had answers.

The transfer at The Villa was quick, and she said goodbye to all but Skye with little more than a nod. She hadn’t even looked at Fitz, though she’d felt his gaze on her as she and Skye descended the ramp and all the way to the do the hangar doors.

She wanted to do the same with Skye, but for all that her insides were twisting in anxiety, she knew herself too well--arid as she was right now, there would be more tears later, more time to regret the way she might treat other people when she was thinking so fully of herself. The worry in Skye’s eyes as she followed her to the medical bay would stay with Jemma if she didn’t do something to relieve it now. She gave a tight smile to Skye, who reached for her hand and gave it a squeeze.

For a moment, Jemma thought the goodbye was over. She took a deep breath of The Villa’s industrially-icy air. The chill pushed back some of the nausea and stilled the persistent slow torque of her vision. It felt good to be cold. Then Skye stepped forward, her arms going around Jemma and pulling her into a close, tight hug. It was a little uncomfortable--she was short enough that her head had to tilt back too far for her chin to reach over Skye’s shoulder, and the warmth of the other girl’s body heat cut into the grounding chill.

“I love you, okay? You’re gonna be fine,” Skye said.

The smile eased off Jemma’s face, unnecessary now that Skye couldn’t see it. She knew she’d be grateful for those words later, so she filed them away for a time when she needed to remember she was loved, that family wasn’t the simple, nuclear thing of television and tradition. When Skye pulled back, all Jemma managed was a sort of twitch of the lips, not even a smile, and a nod. She sniffed, unable to dredge up the will to speak, or the emotional capacity to feel the responding echo of love inside her, though in better times she knew it would be there, just as it was for Coulson and Ward and May and Fitz.

She kept nodding, swallowing thickly as she turned and pressed her badge to the sensor, which winked blue and cycled open the lock.

“Wait,” Skye said, stepping up behind her and pressing the handle of a bag into her hand. “Here. I got some stuff together for you while you were getting ready. Coulson said he didn’t know when we were gonna leave, so…”

Jemma turned her head just enough that she could see Skye’s shoulder, her dark curly hair spilling over a gray hoodie. “Thank you,” she said.

“It’s just pajamas, you know. Underwear. You didn’t have any comfy clothes or anything so I threw in a couple tee shirts and some sweats that are too small for my ass now that Ward’s got me on a squats routine. Which is a little sad, because they’re the comfiest bottoms I own. On the plus side, lift…”

She stopped talking and swallowed, her hand going to Simmons forearm and giving it a squeeze. “Text if you need anything, even just to have someone breathing or chattering at you on the other end of the line.”

Jemma’s fingers pressed to the cool glass of the door as a slight spell of dizziness came over her. Skye’s grip on her forearm strengthened.

“Aren’t they sending someone to meet you?”

“I’m perfectly capable of-” Jemma began, just as the twist in her abdomen became a sudden, agonizing wrench. She felt the jolt of her knees hitting the floor, the heave of her nauseated stomach responding to the pain. It was like a glass jar pressed over her, sound slid from clear and understandable to a muted, warbling rush and draw. Heat flooded up her throat, and she was aware of it splashing onto her hands, thin, body temperature liquid. The sharp stink of bile and the burn at the base of her nasal cavity set her coughing.

Then Skye was there, raking back Jemma’s hair with one hand, grabbing her around the shoulders with the other.

“Hey, can somebody come help us out here?” Skye’s voice was coarse with anger and distress, but at least Jemma’s hearing was back to normal. Her vision wasn’t clearing, though, and she felt herself shaking violently as her body responded to the pain with distress.

Then the doors in front of them opened and a pair of shoes appeared before her, along with the trailing edges of what she guessed were lab coats.

“Sorry, sorry, we were-” one began.

“-briefing from Director Fury regarding-”

“-didn’t realize you were already-”

“Okay, okay, enough excuses--will you give me a hand with her?”

The shoes moved, and next thing, Jemma was being lifted from her crouch, still curling in on herself like a shrimp. Stretching out her legs sent shooting pains down her inner thighs all the way to her knees, and she felt herself shove at the scientist on her left.

“What’s going on?” a deeper voice asked from in front of them.

“Simmons, Simmons!” Skye said. Then her voice was directed elsewhere. “Are you ops? Can you help us?”

“Yeah, trained Med Tech. Hang on.”

A shadow fell over her, and there were fingers on her neck, checking her pulse. A black-clad arm with a dark wrist. Tactical belt. Broad chest, and the same sort of bearing as Ward. “Why didn’t you bring a gurney?” he said.

“We were sent as an escort; we didn’t know it was a medical emergency! We were told she wa to direct us at the lab, not that she needed medical-”

The med tech grunted in response. “You Coulson’s team?” he asked.

“Yes,” Skye answered.

“Don’t worry. Tell him Ward’s replacement has her.” With that, he slid his arms under Jemma and swung her up like a child. “I’ll get her to the med bay.”

“Thanks, Agent…?”

“Triplett.”


End file.
